Beyond The Crash, The Cosmic Consciousness - Book 2, paperback

Book Two of "The Crash" series.

In this, the second book of “The Crash” series, Beyond The Crash, The Cosmic Consciousness, the action continues on a much bigger scale. The destructive mass psychosis called The Crash has caused a worldwide apocalypse, also called The Crash. Billions have died, and those who survived are either “crashed,” themselves, or they appear to have avoided the psychosis. But the nature of the psychosis is still a mystery, and time is running out to find answers and save the crashed survivors from starvation and death.

**SPOILER ALERT: The following description contains spoilers.**

The allied group of crashed people called the Family, who joined with Ben Stoffer and his scientists, continue fighting to find a way to save whoever has survived. Together, they battle the military forces who are trying to steal Ben’s technology. All the while, after having succeeded with a device he invented that helped a small group of crashed survivors, Ben works to create a more powerful brain electromagnetic pulse (BEMP) designed to reset the brains of crashed people on a wider scale. At the same time, the Family experiment with new, non-technological ways of connecting with people around the world, methods that involve mind travels they call Iter Anima. Can they come together in time to help reset the brains of the starving and crashed survivors throughout the world? Is there enough of humanity left to rise from the destruction and create a new world?

Please enjoy an excerpt from Beyond The Crash.

**SPOILER ALERT: The following description contains spoilers.** You should read Backfire Crash first. 

The old shaman woman asks me from a place by her fire, “Who are you?”

I don’t have an answer at hand. What should I say? How can I explain my presence in her mind? How can I explain the fact that we are communicating without being in each other’s physical proximity or using technology? I don’t understand it myself. And I know that I am not dreaming. 

After thinking about it, I reply in the only way I can, not with language, but with thoughts about ideas, “I’m in another place. I’m still trying to understand why I came to you in particular. I’m starting to believe I have an obligation to understand stories and share them. I think the things that happen to people throughout the world, throughout time, should be remembered. Where I am from, we have had some very big problems lately. Apparently, those problems have not yet reached you. Maybe your isolation here in the north is the reason. I don’t know, but I believe that we have lost our heart. Our societies have been wandering, though not like yours have. We became lost as humans. We submerged ourselves in the wrong things. We were led by lies. For too many, life became an endless fight over things that should not have divided us, but they did. We have lost many people throughout the world recently, to a mental contagion. And I am trying to help those who remain. I’m trying to bring them together.”

“Why is it for you to do this?”

“If not me, who? I’m with others who are trying to help. I’m not alone.”

“What do you see with me and my family that could help you?”

“Maybe we need an appreciation for a more human struggle instead of the mind games that became the basis for our typical arguments, arguments with people who sometimes never even met each other.”

“How could they argue if they had never met?”

This makes me laugh. Great question, but how to explain?

“We had ways of communicating with each other in different places. Not like what we’re doing right now, but through . . . other means. We could talk real-time over big distances. We could leave messages for anyone to see, and very often, people didn’t like the messages, so they would leave other messages, complaining about the first messages. And we began to argue. And it expanded to bigger and bigger groups. People took sides and began to hate each other’s groups.”

“We who are out here are not as disconnected as you might think,” she says. “I know about radio, TV, and the internet. What you’re describing must be a problem with those. What did people say in the messages that was so bad?”

She is getting right to the heart of it without understanding the complexity of what is going on. Maybe she doesn’t need to understand everything to get the essence.

I say, “Often, the things they said in the messages were not much more than their opinions on something such as what they thought of something someone else had done.” As I try to explain this, I realize how stupid it sounds. 

She asks, “People left messages about their opinions, and others left more messages about their opinions of the opinions? They aren’t telling each other where the right place is to hunt or whether or not the ice is thick enough to cross?”

“Well, sometimes they did talk about food, but it was usually to show how good it was, not to help others find food. I know this sounds rather ridiculous. I guess that’s my point. Most of the time, finding food was not much of a problem. Most of us had comfortable enough places to live in, so shelter wasn’t an issue, either. In our messages, we too often spoke of what we thought about what others were doing, or bragged about the things we were doing. Helping each other wasn’t part of the deal as much as it should have been.”

“And you did this, too?”

“I wasn’t into that sort of stuff, so I just started hiding in my apartment, my shelter.”

“How did you get food?”

“I made enough money . . . until the end . . . so I could just buy . . . trade . . . food. Not many of us hunted or grew our own food . . . well, I hunted, but not regularly. I hid in my shelter because I didn’t like the fighting. When everything changed, I still hid until Ben . . . .” I trail off.

“Things got worse?”

“People went crazy. Many died because of a mind disease called The Crash. Very few of us remain alive and apparently sane, but more can still be saved. We’re just trying to find ways to save them.”

“And to do this, you are here visiting us, visiting me in my mind?”

“That’s about the gist of it.” I begin to wonder if she understands my odd speech mannerisms through my thoughts. I wonder if sarcasm comes across in the spiritual world, or however I am communicating with her. 

She says, “It sounds as if things may have gotten too easy for your people. How did they find time to fight over opinions? And you come here to see how to live?”

“That may very well be why I’m here. I don’t know yet, but I do know that we need to reconnect with reality, stop focusing on our differences, and especially the lies that many used to manipulate us. We need to remember what life is about.”

She says, “I can not speak for your people or for you. I can tell you what we do. I can not tell you what you should do.”

“I believe I came here to see other ways of life. I want to learn who you are so I might find who we are not. Maybe find who we should be.”

She says, “We are who you see. We do not argue about opinions of opinions. We discuss and decide. We live. We eat. We sleep. We follow the seasons. We find warmth and comfort. We help each other. We share the work. We do our duties. We embrace each other. We love.”

Nothing she said is a surprise to me. It is all truth. It is also what we have lost. I know it. And I want to find how to bring it back into our lives. No doubt that we do not want to live the rough life that they do, barely existing, at the mercy of the weather, seeking out the right grasses for the herd, waiting for the fortuitous flow of events that will let us survive for another year. But we need an appreciation of this. It really had become too easy for us. Without addressing our own survival, we became lost in a menagerie of meaningless minutiae, in a cage of our own making that shrunk around us until we lost our own space and fought for each inch of air, while outside our cage, more air than we could possibly breathe awaited our desperate lungs. 

I say, “These things like what you experience now were in our lives, too, but not enough. We pushed them to the back and grabbed onto superficial discrepancies. We lost ourselves in ideologies, groups fighting over little of consequence, but fighting nonetheless. We forgot why we lived and what joined us. We attacked what were our differences and attacked each other, too. We drew lines in the sand when we didn’t understand each other or what was on either side of the lines. And most importantly, we didn’t even see the lies that were being used to divide us. It made us insane.”

Not for the first time, I am surprised at the articulated thoughts that came out of me. I hadn’t organized my thinking about this into concise ideas until these “words” came out, but I am also pleased at my own clarity. 

She says, “For this, we have solutions.”

Solutions. Oh boy! Solutions again. “We had solutions, too. They made it worse.”

“Perhaps they were not the right solutions.”

Okay, there’s an understatement. But shit. I could see the problems. I grew to understand so much of what was wrong as we fought our way across the city and to Ben’s lab. Lots of problems and things that were misunderstood and perverted into distortions of truth. And we got behind Ben to attack the problems by trying to reverse the distortions brought about by lies. We tried to reset brains so that we could think clearly again. But what would we think about if we could clear our minds? How would we change our direction and focus? Maybe the disaster of The Crash was that thing that would force us to move in a better direction. 

I say, “Some of the solutions were wrong. Some were right. As we clear people’s thinking, we need to find ways to reconnect. That’s what we are trying to do now. We need to reconnect, but we also need to communicate more. And we need to listen! We need to bring together the clear-thinking people so they can find commonality.”

“And you came here as a choice of places to travel.”

“I did. And I did not imagine where I was going in advance. I just showed up. Here I am. And here you are. There’s something about you and your family that matters to us. I must be here to find out what that is.”

She remains quiet for some time. She stares into the fire. She closes her eyes. She says, “I believe you have already found it.”

Steve Patchin is an author, photographer, and artist who has been working and running a studio in Las Vegas, Nevada since 1996. Derelict Dreams, an Illustrated Novel is his first novel. It includes more than 80 full-color original artistic photographs that make his apocalyptic story of two young sisters come alive. Steve is a Las Vegas native with an extensive portfolio of photographic images, realistic composites, and impressionistic paintings. He has owned and operated his photography and video business, Patchin Pictures, since 1996, winning eight Emmys for his work.

Steve has never stopped expanding and refining his art, photography, and writing. His resume of images displays an abundance of styles and subjects that are uniquely appealing: from traditional landscapes and cityscapes to his distinctive “photo paintings” that are more impressionistic, sometimes surreal, or other-worldly. The next book in The Crash series is Beyond The Crash, The Cosmic Consciousness.